Irreplaceable teachers in the AI era are teacher leaders

This study examined how school principals conceptualised “irreplaceable” teachers in AI-enabled schools and how these portrayals intersected with teacher leadership. Using an interpretive qualitative design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 principals from AI-active K–12 private schools in five Arab countries. Principals were recruited through a regional professional network, and data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings showed that teachers whom principals regarded as indispensable positioned AI as a tool that followed their professional judgement, using it as an assistant while keeping explanation, questioning, and feedback human-led. These teachers used AI to deepen rather than replace thinking, turning AI outputs into prompts for justification, critique, and improvement, and requiring students to make visible how they had used AI. They deliberately cultivated student agency and digital ethics, adopted autonomy-supportive pedagogies, and assumed informal leadership roles with colleagues by modelling AI use, redesigning tasks and assessments, and shaping school-level guidelines. They also built their AI professionalism through participation in virtual communities of practice and ongoing self-study. Collectively, these patterns appeared to map closely onto core dimensions of teacher leadership, suggesting that leadership is potentially one mechanism through which teachers can retain a distinctive, non-automatable contribution and that policies concerned with teacher replacement may need to focus on leveraging teachers as leaders for the AI era.